Achievement Hunting addiction
Well......
I kinda wanted to talk about some stuff that has been on my mind for the last 2 years.
After reaching 1 Million Gamerscore i was really happy. One of my biggest goals in gaming was reached and I couldn't be happier. Afterwards i decided to go casual and start playing games for fun, but soon found out that this was going to be an issue.
Now you may wonder why that would be an issue because playing casually shouldn’t be an issue would it?
Well to my surprise i just couldn't let go of the idea that i have to complete a game i play achievement wise (or at least the base 1000G).
I always kept looking on how difficult would it be to complete said game? how long will it take? do I want to go through all that trouble?
This to this day still prevents me from playing certain games i have an interest in wanting to play because if a game is too difficult or needs to many playthroughs or is a borderline grind achievement wise ill skip the game altogether.
It really sucks that i have this much difficulty in letting it go.
On one hand i don't want to let it go and on the other hand i still want to keep going.
But here lies the issue (for me at least) over the years the achievement scene became easier and easier. especially in the indie scene. This resulted in getting an easy gratification in unlocking achievements. I didn’t care if it was easy or not or that the game was even remotely good or not. The only thing i cared about was getting the dopamine hit from unlocking achievements. A lot of games became super short and easy to get the full completion to the point it was starting to feel like I was getting cheap drugs. I felt a rush every time I paid 5 bucks to get a game that only took 10 minutes or less to complete. At this point I started to get dependent on it, I needed this quick and easy rush otherwise I wasn't satisfied.
Sounds familiar? Some of you might get what I’m saying but for those who don’t.
I was becoming an addict, I couldn't stop I yearned for it and starting to ignore every game that was longer than 1 or 2 hours cause it would take too long to get the rush of hearing the sound of achievements unlocking.
It got worse......
At some point some publisher figured it be a good idea to test something out.
what would happen if we update the game with an extra 1000G? would it increase sales? how would the achievement community respond to this?
Well plenty of people applauded it cause hey who doesn't like free quick and easy achievements? i sure as hell did. these updated became more and more frequently and made me fall further into my addiction.
Fast forward to my 1 Million Gamerscore moment....
I made it, and my drive to play games drastically changed from wanting to play longer games to not playing any games at all for periods at a time. The need for achievements quick and fast still lingered in me but i was starting to feel disgusted at myself for what I have become. I didn't want this anymore but my body kept yelling at me that i need it. At this point achievement hunting became a chore and quite frankly not fun. I just wanted to go back to the days where i had fun playing games without having to look at achievements. But the damage was already done. I even tried playing on different platforms to no avail. I got bored real quick and stopped playing games if I couldn’t get any achievements in it.
In summary
I love achievements and dare I say I’m addicted to achievements.
But it has come to a point where the quick and easy short games with their stupid title updates ruined me.
I lost the spark that set me on my 1 million journey and i still have trouble in playing longer games and enjoying myself doing it. Slowly but surely im getting on the right track but i feel like its going to take years to even get back to where i was if even possible.
Kinda wanted to get this off my chest since it has been bugging me for a while now.
Apologies for my incoherent ramblings and probably a boatload of spelling mistakes.
